Physiotherapy and physical therapy
The back went out on Saturday. The patient asks an assistant who can see them on Monday, and the answer names a few practices.
A patient types the problem into the question: the knee after surgery, the jaw that clicks, the swelling that will not go down, a father who cannot get to a clinic. They add what matters, such as no referral, an evening slot or their plan, and the answer comes back as names. What it can say about you depends on what your pages state.
Whether an assistant can name your practice for a patient's question depends first on what your pages state in text: the condition and the treatment by name, who provides it, whether a patient can book without a referral, the fee and the plans you bill, how long a session lasts, clinic or home, and your hours. It has to read as one practice, too: one name, one address, one number.
How your customers ask
What patients type before booking a first assessment
The facts a patient's question sorts practices by
Each part of the question works as a filter: the condition, the treatment, the way in, the cost, the length of a visit, the place, the hour. An AI assistant can say your practice passes one only if something it draws on says so, and your own site is the one source where you write every word.
| The filter | What your site states | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The condition | The problems you see patients for, in patients' words: [low back pain, sprained ankles, rehab after a knee replacement, jaw clicking] | A conditions page |
| The treatment | What it is, who provides it, the session length, the fee | A page per treatment |
| Who treats | Each therapist's name, title and license in the licensing body's wording, and whom they see | A page per therapist |
| The way in | "[Practice name] sees patients [with or without] a doctor's referral", and the plans or claims that need one before they pay | The booking page |
| The cost | First assessment and follow-up fees, the plans you bill directly, how patients claim the rest | A fees page in HTML |
| The visit | How long a first assessment and a follow-up last; what to wear and bring | Booking and treatment pages |
| Clinic or home | Whether you treat at home, in which towns, on which days | A home visits page |
| The hour | Hours by day for each location, evenings and weekends included | Each location's page |
| One identity | One name, one address form, one main number per location | Every page and listing |
Two habits keep those facts clear of advice and promises. The pages say what the practice does and for whom, never what will happen to a patient. And any rule that differs by place, such as who may book without a referral, which titles a therapist may use or what a plan pays for, appears only as the practice's own policy or its therapists' own credentials; the rule itself belongs to whoever sets it.
Which schema.org type fits a physiotherapy practice?
schema.org has one, and we checked it there: Physiotherapy, a subtype of MedicalBusiness in the LocalBusiness schema family. The word is also a value in schema.org's list of medical specialties, which is why its page calls it an enumeration member. As a type it takes the name, address, telephone and opening hours that Google's local business documentation lists, written as JSON-LD.
Three medical properties a doctor's office can use do not apply. schema.org defines isAcceptingNewPatients for medical organizations, and availableService and medicalSpecialty for clinics, hospitals and physicians; Physiotherapy is none of those. So new patients, referrals and the plans you bill stay in the text, where patients read them anyway. Each therapist is a Person with a jobTitle and a hasCredential for the license; each treatment is a Service the practice provides.
Leave ratings out of the practice's own node. Google's local business documentation recommends aggregateRating only for sites that collect reviews about other businesses, and its review snippet page calls reviews a business controls about itself self-serving, ineligible for stars. Quote real reviews as text, with a first name, the date and the platform, where the reviewer agreed and your privacy obligations allow. The full build is in treatment pages that survive being quoted.
What the audit found across 40 trades, and where a practice starts
We publish no figure for physiotherapy practices alone; each number here covers the whole sample. Our audit covered 9,483 small business websites that answered its crawler, in 40 trades and 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, between late August and early September 2026. 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind. Across their own three main pages, 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are, 36.9% gave more than one phone number and 34.1% no postal address a machine could parse.
17.8% carried no schema.org markup at all, and most of the rest described the website rather than the business; LocalBusiness appeared on roughly a quarter of the sites. 7.2% sat behind bot protection that served our crawler a challenge page, a block nobody had decided on, and 2.1% kept real content, such as a price list or a service menu, in a PDF.
The audit also asked. For 9,240 of the businesses one buyer question from their trade and metro went to Claude with web retrieval on, and 14.9% were named: one question, one assistant, one day, a Claude figure and a direction, not a rate. On inspection, those named were the businesses whose sites carried answer-shaped content and a consistent identity. The order of work that follows:
- One name, one address form and one main number per location, the same on every page and listing you control, so the practice reads as one entity.
- A booking page stating whether patients can book without a referral, and a fees page in HTML with the plans you bill, worded as in the questions physio patients ask, answered in writing.
- A page for each treatment you want patients for, as a page for each treatment works through.
- The crawler access check, then what OpenAI's crawlers receive with your booking system in place, per what OpenAI's crawler page settles.
- Physiotherapy markup for each location and a Service node for each treatment, repeating the pages.
- A first reading on a fixed panel of patient questions by condition, treatment and place, then the same questions monthly, as in what being named means for a physio practice.
Go deeper
Each part of the work, written up in full
Fundamentals
AI visibility for physiotherapy practices: what being named means
AI Engines
ChatGPT and a physio practice: what OpenAI's crawler page settles
Content & Answer Pages
Manual therapy, jaw (TMJ) treatment, lymphatic drainage: a page for each
Technical & Structure
Treatment pages that survive being quoted: how to build one
Content & Answer Pages
The questions physio patients ask, collected and answered in writing
Objections a clinic owner might raise
Most of our patients arrive with a referral. Does an assistant still matter?
When a referral names a need rather than a clinic, the patient holding it still chooses where to go, and asks the same things: who is close, who has evening hours, who bills my plan. Patients who can book without one choose entirely on their own. Either way, what an answer can say about your practice depends on what your pages and listings state.
We are a one-therapist practice. Does any of this apply to us?
All of it, at a smaller size. A patient asks the same things of a practice with one therapist: what you treat, whether they can book without a referral, the fee, the hours, whether you visit at home. The therapist's page and the about page can be one page, a handful of treatment pages may cover everything you offer, and the measurement works the same way.
Our booking software gives us a public profile. Is that enough?
It is the software company's page, in its own format and sometimes beside other clinics, and it may leave out your referral policy, fees or therapists' titles. Keep the booking link, and put the facts on your own site, where you control every word. If the booking system sits in front of your public pages too, check what a crawler receives.
Some of our fees depend on the patient's plan. Should we publish fees at all?
Publish what the practice sets: the self-pay fee for a first assessment and a follow-up, what each includes, and the date you last checked it. For plans, list the ones you bill directly and say how patients claim the rest. What a plan leaves the patient to pay is the plan's to state, and the page can say so.